1.5.8-Aphraseremains
Brick!Club 1.5.8 Madame Victurnien spends thirty-five francs in the cause of morality In which everything goes from good to terrible in about two pages. (Seriously, we get, like, a paragraph of Fantine being happy before it falls apart again. That was… abrupt.) So, Fantine has work, is happy, her hair and teeth are visible again. On one hand, some of the ill effects of her time with Tholomyes are undone and “her natural readiness to work was genuinely revived”. On the other hand, she makes the mistake of furnishing her room on credit – which we are directly told is “a survival of her disorderly habits” – which traps her in town when everything goes south. “Not being able to claim that she was married” – once again, why? Hugo, you can’t keep saying this and never justifying it, especially not when you have actually shown her lying and saying she’s a widow once already. But she’s having trouble with other women again, thinking she’s ‘putting on airs’ (exact same complaint Favourite had, even) for sending letters frequently (bzuh?) and being jealous of her hair and teeth (always with the hair and teeth. Just to make sure we’ve noticed them and understand their significance with regards to representing her youth and beauty later.) And her illiteracy forces her to have to entrust her secrets to a letter-writer, so everyone finds them out very quickly. And gossip. A whole long thing about gossip. Which reinforces my earlier thoughts about what Hugo is saying about it: gossip is at best mean-spirited and unhelpful, and at worst (and more frequently) malicious and actively harmful, and is contrasted with people taking action to help people (“as much time and resources to the answering of those riddles as would suffice for a dozen good deeds” to go with the gossips of M-sur-M trying their hardest to ascribe ulterior motives to Madeleine’s efforts to help people instead of taking it as an example or supporting him). Where it was at least just people standing around talking mean-spiritedly earlier, now it is inspiring people to take action that they should not be taking, prying into people’s secrets in the service of enabling gossip and upholding dubious moral principles at the expense of other people. Spending money “in the cause of morality” but not doing the actually moral thing. Madame Victurnien basically takes out her own unhappiness on other people by being “an inflexible guardian of public morals” – not exactly a ringing endorsement for that sort of morality. (See also: Javert, with his inflexible moral code that he privileges above individual human suffering. But he’s a lot more sincere – I get the impression Mme Victurnien’s using it as an excuse to hurt people more than anything, whereas he does so incidentally because it doesn’t occur to him to question his worldview or think about how circumstances might complicate it.) Fantine is still convinced that she genuinely did wrong by having sex with Tholomyes. She accepts the mayor’s (implied but totally the consequence of the policy he is so adamant about) verdict as just at this point. (And so she doesn’t ask him for help because she doesn’t think she has the right to complain or ask for more from him.) (Also, I guess Mme Victurnien showing up and asking questions was the “devious means” by which Thenardier figured out Cosette was illegitimate, since he raised the price right after she went?) Comments Sarah1281 …I never thought that that was how Thenardier realized the truth. Wow, that is brilliant!